U.S. Open: A Masterpiece at Pinehurst Is Hosting Again

Golf is a game where coincidence and chance can lift or deflate even the most skilled players. Those at this week’s U.S. Open at the Pinehurst Resort & Country Club’s No. 2 course will certainly get good and bad breaks in the native areas off the fairways; the same holds true for the bounces their balls will take around the greens.

But chance played a big role in the very creation of the course by the architect Donald Ross that became the United States Golf Association’s first anchor site in 2020 for the U.S. Open. (That means every five years the club will host the national championship.)

In 1899, Ross was working at Royal Dornoch Golf Club in Scotland, wrote Lee Pace, the author of “The Golden Age of Pinehurst: The Story of the Rebirth of No. 2.” After hearing a golfer from Boston talk about how quickly golf was growing in the United States, Ross and another club employee decided they both wanted to go to America. But someone needed to stay in Dornoch to keep that club running.

So the two friends figured there was only one fair way to decide who would go to America and who would stay in Scotland: a coin toss.

Ross won the flip and emigrated, arriving in Boston. There he began working at a local golf course that was near the home of James Tufts, the founder of Pinehurst Resort & Country Club. In 1900, Tufts hired Ross to work at Pinehurst in the winter when the course in Massachusetts would be closed. With that chance assignment, so began Ross’s love of the North Carolina sandhills, which he said reminded him of his home in Dornoch.